Breathometer breathalyzer a fun party game, but not the most accurate

March 3, 2014

Transcript

-Hi, I'm Wayne Cunningham.
-And I'm Caitlin Petrakovitz.
-And we are here taking a look at the Breathometer.
Now, this is a breathalyzer attachment for the iPhone, and it kind of explains why we have a couple of bottles of booze here that we're gonna try it out.
The Breathometer is a-- it's a little device here.
It's about the size of, I don't know, airplane bottle or a couple of double A batteries.
It's got a little hatch in the side here where you can fit a triple A battery and that powers the thing, but it needs an
iPhone to actually do anything at all.
So, it has this little retractable thing here that goes into the iPhone's headphone jack.
Let's look at my iPhone handy right here, and hook this thing up together, and it's like, "Oh wait, it won't go on the top because this is an iPhone 5." Breathometer really is designed for iPhone 4, so I have to plug it into the headphone jack in the bottom here.
I also have an app for the Breathometer on my iPhone.
It really won't work without the app.
And you see nice big blue start button here, and that's how you do it.
So pretty easy to start up process.
So, Caitlin, how much for you?
I think you'd better drink some more.
-I've had, you know, probably a regular glass of a 10% beer.
-That sounds pretty hefty.
Do you think you're safe to drive?
-I think I could drive.
-Okay.
Well, let's test that out.
-Okay.
-So I'm gonna push this start button.
It's gonna wait a few seconds while it calibrates, then you blow into this little blue blowing hole here.
-Okay.
-for about 5 seconds.
Really, it's just a breathe in, then exhale into the sensor.
-So it's analyzing, testing, and processing.
-That's a pretty hefty result.
It's a big red ring to it.
It shows that you're way over.
Now, that-- I don't think that's actually an accurate result because I haven't seen you drink a whole lot today except for a bit of this beer.
-Yeah.
-It seems--
-Yeah.
It seems a lot.
What I've seen from the Breathometer is that-- well, one thing they say is you're not supposed to use it until 20 minutes after your last drink.
And so you might have like breathed--
-Me, it's been
about two minutes.
-Right.
You might have breathed out some like alcohol directly into the thing.
So I'll give it a try.
I've been drinking whiskey here, but it's been, I don't know, like 10, maybe 15 minutes--
-Yeah, you've--
-since I've had a drink.
So we'll give that a try.
It's analyzing my breath right now, my whiskey breath, and it gave me a 0.00.
-Wow.
-Apparently, I have not had a single thing to drink.
So, that's actually one of my critics of this thing is a professional breathalyzer will often have a nozzle sort of thing, a plastic for you to blow directly into.
This just has a set of open area here.
So, when you've had a few drinks, you might kind of blow around it or not really blow accurately into the sensor.
This thing only costs about $50.
So it's a fairly cheap addition to the iPhone; although, you can find a lot of breathalyzers online or have
the cheaper, a lot of keychain breathalyzers, that kind of thing.
What I found with this is it's pretty fun at parties in a bar.
People always want to give it a try and see what it comes out with, but I would not rely on it to tell you whether you're safe to drive or not.
You can-- you should really just count how many drinks you've had and decide whether, you know, if you're safe or not and go very conservative with that number too.
But anyway, I'm Wayne Cunningham.
-And I'm Caitlin Petrakovitz.
-And we were looking at the Breathometer breathalyzer for the iPhone.